11 ms·

Are we Java Programmers done for?

1 points by nreece 18y ago

SwellJoe 18y ago
I met someone from Sun at a cloud computing meetup on Tuesday, and she had a slide that showed the "old" model, and the companies that participated and thrived in it (including Microsoft, Peoplesoft, Oracle, etc.), and the "new" model (encompassing cloud computing, openness in protocol if not in source, etc.), and Sun was in that group. She then had to concede that the slide was a little bit old, and that now Sun and Oracle were the same company...and we'd all have to see how that played out. She seemed hopeful, if possibly a bit concerned. I feel kinda sorry for Sun, as they'd just recently started to get the hang of this new Internet boom and were starting to participate in a meaningful way. Now the hackers that fought back up to the helm at Sun and had started to turn the ship around are now going to have to head right back into battle with an even stodgier pro-business, anti-hacker company. I suspect there will be a large outflow of engineers as the reality of the new company sets in. But, I would like to think Oracle would be smart enough to recognize that they bought themselves one of the best engineering organizations in the world, and that the best thing they can do is stand back and let them invent...and then use that sales juggernaut they wield to sell those inventions. Tim Bray's "Us and Them" article was the best I've seen from the inside, but it's been taken down due to advisement from Sun's legal staff.
- gaius 18y ago
  I'd hesitate to describe Oracle as "anti-hacker". There's so much duplication and overlap and redundancy in their product range not because they don't know what they're doing but because they'll ship anything anyone comes up with and see what sticks with customers. You can download pretty much everything they do for free from their website and play with it. Sure their core RDBMS engine is closed-source (they've got to make money somehow) but most of the actual functionality is in PL/SQL and you can read it to your heart's content. Same business model is used by Wolfram.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    I've always felt Wolfram is also kind of anti-hacker (which is why things like SciPy and R have seen such large uptake amongst hackers), so they're not the best example from my perspective. Oracle has never once struck me as being one of those, "It'd be really cool to work there" kind of places. Sun, on the other hand, frequently has. I'm also a bit more Open Source oriented than most people, and Sun has embraced Open Source in the past two years in ways few companies that weren't spawned of Open Source (like Red Hat) have ever done. Folks think Google is very friendly to Open Source, but they haven't even begun to have the kind of impact that Sun has had over the years. I may have gentler feelings towards Sun than some folks because of the contributions they've made to my own projects over the years (Sun was one of the very earliest contributors to Webmin, and has remained helpful ever since)...but since Sun has consistently been a friend to nearly every project I've ever had interaction with, and not just that one, I think it is built into their genes. Oracle has never done anything nice for any project I've ever been involved in, so it's like 10 projects to zero in favor of Sun. Being helpful (a deeply held hacker tradition) just doesn't seem to be in the character of Oracle, except when it is directly beneficial to them.

1 points by nreece 18y ago

I met someone from Sun at a cloud computing meetup on Tuesday, and she had a slide that showed the "old" model, and the companies that participated and thrived in it (including Microsoft, Peoplesoft, Oracle, etc.), and the "new" model (encompassing cloud computing, openness in protocol if not in source, etc.), and Sun was in that group. She then had to concede that the slide was a little bit old, and that now Sun and Oracle were the same company...and we'd all have to see how that played out. She seemed hopeful, if possibly a bit concerned. I feel kinda sorry for Sun, as they'd just recently started to get the hang of this new Internet boom and were starting to participate in a meaningful way. Now the hackers that fought back up to the helm at Sun and had started to turn the ship around are now going to have to head right back into battle with an even stodgier pro-business, anti-hacker company. I suspect there will be a large outflow of engineers as the reality of the new company sets in. But, I would like to think Oracle would be smart enough to recognize that they bought themselves one of the best engineering organizations in the world, and that the best thing they can do is stand back and let them invent...and then use that sales juggernaut they wield to sell those inventions. Tim Bray's "Us and Them" article was the best I've seen from the inside, but it's been taken down due to advisement from Sun's legal staff.

gaius 18y ago
I'd hesitate to describe Oracle as "anti-hacker". There's so much duplication and overlap and redundancy in their product range not because they don't know what they're doing but because they'll ship anything anyone comes up with and see what sticks with customers. You can download pretty much everything they do for free from their website and play with it. Sure their core RDBMS engine is closed-source (they've got to make money somehow) but most of the actual functionality is in PL/SQL and you can read it to your heart's content. Same business model is used by Wolfram.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  I've always felt Wolfram is also kind of anti-hacker (which is why things like SciPy and R have seen such large uptake amongst hackers), so they're not the best example from my perspective. Oracle has never once struck me as being one of those, "It'd be really cool to work there" kind of places. Sun, on the other hand, frequently has. I'm also a bit more Open Source oriented than most people, and Sun has embraced Open Source in the past two years in ways few companies that weren't spawned of Open Source (like Red Hat) have ever done. Folks think Google is very friendly to Open Source, but they haven't even begun to have the kind of impact that Sun has had over the years. I may have gentler feelings towards Sun than some folks because of the contributions they've made to my own projects over the years (Sun was one of the very earliest contributors to Webmin, and has remained helpful ever since)...but since Sun has consistently been a friend to nearly every project I've ever had interaction with, and not just that one, I think it is built into their genes. Oracle has never done anything nice for any project I've ever been involved in, so it's like 10 projects to zero in favor of Sun. Being helpful (a deeply held hacker tradition) just doesn't seem to be in the character of Oracle, except when it is directly beneficial to them.